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The Caribs were by 1907 a relatively small group. They were descended from the indigenous population of the Caribbean and they were resident on Dominica and St Vincent, two of the islands of the Lesser Antilles in British possession. In one sense they were ‘merely’ another of the native peoples of the world sheltering as best they could in some corner of a European empire where they had been left after their usefulness had been exhausted or their fight for survival overcome. This chapter offers an analysis, informed by literary approaches, of a relatively self-contained body of texts. A...

The Caribs were by 1907 a relatively small group. They were descended from the indigenous population of the Caribbean and they were resident on Dominica and St Vincent, two of the islands of the Lesser Antilles in British possession. In one sense they were ‘merely’ another of the native peoples of the world sheltering as best they could in some corner of a European empire where they had been left after their usefulness had been exhausted or their fight for survival overcome. This chapter offers an analysis, informed by literary approaches, of a relatively self-contained body of texts. A fundamental starting point is that what offers itself as a representation of a culture, or a national history, embodied in a history of Western observation of indigenous peoples and that intersects with the history of the Caribs themselves. This is a history inseparable from that of the decline of one empire, the rise of another, and the travails of Dominican independence.